Infinitive Splitter

The map below shows the distance from Pittsburgh to all the cities with Major League Baseball teams in the National League Central and National League East divisions. Mileage was calculated using city-to-city driving directions with Google Maps.

The Pirates are in the Central division, but they quite clearly shouldn’t be.

To start, Pittsburgh is farther east than Atlanta. No other teams in Major League Baseball are similarly miscategorized. Every team in the AL West is farther west than every team in the AL Central, and every team in the AL Central is farther west than every team in the AL East. All NL West teams are appropriately western. Only the NL East and Central have this problem. Moving the Pirates to the NL East would solve it and restore geographical logic to the league.

Second, Pittsburgh is closer, on average, to NL East teams (mean: 556 miles; median: 370 miles) than to NL Central teams (mean: 662 miles; median: 551 miles). Surely some of the Pirates’ lackluster performance can be attributed to the unnecessarily long distances they have to travel between cities in their own division!

Third, the NL Central is the only MLB division with six teams. All others have five, except the AL West, which gets away with only four. No fair! The Wild Card is some consolation, but it’s certainly still easier to get to the playoffs by winning a four- or five-team division than a six-team division. NL Central teams deserve a break, and the Pirates, with their total inability to win games, are just the team to shift the burden. NL Central teams might appreciate the smaller division, and NL East teams would get an unthreatening punching bag to play with every few weeks. Everybody wins! (Of course, point three works under the assumption that the Braves would stay in the NL East.)

Fourth, I live in Washington and would like to see my hometown team come to RFK more often.

Good news, Pirates fans! A $10 bet with Bodog today on the Buccos to win the World Series will be good for $30,000 in November.

I imagine that it will feel pretty good to cash in that ticket, especially after watching a .359 team make up a 22-game deficit to win it all.

(Same goes for all of you in Kansas City: 3000/1 odds.)

It’s possible that, in the future, this website will house a brilliant daily webcomic. Until then, make sure you read these every day:

• Dinosaur Comics
• Toothpaste for Dinner
  
• Married to the Sea
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• Spamusement (not daily, but the archive is large enough that you can pretend it is)

Go, enjoy.

Oh boy. House Republicans yesterday failed to gather enough votes to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, despite its heretofore-unobvious potential for resolving the conflict in the Middle East:

Another Georgia Republican, Representative Phil Gingrey, said support for traditional marriage “is perhaps the best message we can give to the Middle East and all the trouble they’re having over there right now.”

Fortunately for the republic, they did much better on a vote today to prevent unhinged First-Amendment fanatics from taking “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.  As Dennis Hastert knows, reverting the pledge back to its atheistic, pre-1954 form would go against “America’s founding principles,” like religious establishment.  And pandering to ignorant masses. You say Enlightenment, I say to-mah-to.

Finally, and just as vitally, President Bush today vetoed his first piece of legislation.  After nearly six years of mounting deficits, endless war, more poor, staggering health-care costs, widening income gaps, corruption, corporate malfeasance, and encroached-upon civil liberties, the policy he just can’t abide is the one that might offer hope to victims of spinal-cord injuries.

Already a week to be proud of.

Addendum.  See also, in the Post’s “under God” story, this unfortunate which clause (emphasis added):

“We are making an all-out assault on the Constitution of the United States which, thank God, will fail,” said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Why is it standard never to display a price in advertisements for big-time live music?  I just got an email from the 930 Club promoting the Virgin Festival (with Gnarls Barkley, The Flaming Lips, Wolfmother, Kasabian and others), and I had to hunt around a little to find out how much it would cost.  Local bands always put the price of the show right on the poster, because most people — everyone but the die-hard fans for whom money is no object — care about that stuff.

If you’re interested, tickets for the festival are $97.50, so you won’t see me there.  That’s far too much to pay for a concert headlined by The Who and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the year 2006.